Earlier this week, Condé Nast announced that it had hired McKinsey & Co. to help it "rethink" how it does business and "develop new perspectives on optimizing our approach to business [and] growing revenues." Is it a coincidence that Condé's parent company filed a lawsuit against the British West Indies today?

The consultants haven't even arrived yet and the Conde Nasties are already being forced to sacrifice. According to this note posted in the common area of the Gourmet offices, the Nasties are now being forced to wash their own dishes!

We asked, and you answered. After the jump, everything you need to know about how to survive a McKinsey & Co. visit to your company, without getting canned. This one's for you, Conde Nasties.

• BusinessWeek's Jon Fine reports that New York owner Bruce Wasserstein may be in the running to break out a dollar bill and buy BusinessWeek. [BW]
• ESPN banned New York Post employees from appearing on the network yesterday after the paper ran (blurry) pics of a nude Erin Andrews. [AP]
• Will will happen with McKinsey consultants now infiltrating Condé Nast? How should you behave if you work there? Some answers and tips. [NYM, Gawker]
• Martha Stewart loves Twitter, doesn't particularly care for Facebook. [TDB]
• Kate Major, the Jon Gosselin-loving, publicity-seeking reporter for publicity-seeking Star magazine, has resigned from the junky tabloid. [Star]
• Ad revenue fell precipitously, but the New York Times Co. reported second-quarter profits of $39.1 million, up from $21.1 million a year ago. [NYT]
• Related: Is the Times Co. planning to hang on to the Boston Globe? [E&P]
• America's most trusted newscaster? That would be Jon Stewart. [Time]

The management at Conde Nast is well aware that lowly assistants—who are paid poverty wages in order to take order from high-strung self-important media assholes in $8,000 outfits all day—could snap at any time. Solution: divide, conquer.

In your cackling Wednesday media column: Hoda Kotb describes her love of working with the mentally ill, Conde Nast's other McKinsey go-around, an intern is led astray by J-School demons, and Janice Min denies everything.

• Why did Janice Min leave Us? It was about money, reports WWD, which explains that given the economy, Jann Wenner wasn't prepared to offer her the $2 million a year she's been collecting. Min is denying it. [WWD, NYDN]
• Dan Rather’s $70 million lawsuit against CBS is back on track. [NYT, WSJ]
• McKinsey has been retained by Condé Nast to do the sort of "rethinking" and "realigning" that the consulting firm gets paid enormous sums to do. And while it isn't the first time McKinsey has been in the building—they were hired by Condé in 2001—this time employees are totally freaking out. [NYO]
• One title that is doing well: Food Network Magazine, apparently. [CNY]
• ESPN's Erin Andrews was secretly videotaped in the nude while staying at a hotel. Now an ESPN employee is said to have been behind it. [NYDN, AP]

Floundering Conde Nast has hired McKinsey & Co. to help them "rethink" the way they do business, which usually involves layoffs. Not to worry, Conde Nasties! Our worldly readers will help you survive this trying time.

Despite the fact that The Bobs are coming to send many to the unemployment line, Conde Nasters still need to hook up, thus they post Missed Connections ads on Craigslist. Naturally, we'd love to help facilitate a coupling!

Condé Nast editors used to be too fancy to bother with the grubby Web; they dumped all their content onto online junkyards. Greed and petty jealousy, though, have turned them into true believers, and they want their "websites" now, please.

Just after announcing it would bring in McKinsey & Co. for some horrific cost-cutting, Conde Nast has released its official projections for its crucial September ad sales. We knew the numbers would be bad; they lived up to expectations.

• Janice Min isn't renewing her contract as editor-in-chief of Jann Wenner's Us Weekly. Her No. 2, Michael Steele, will become acting editor in chief. [NYT]
• Condé Nast announced yesterday that it had retained the management consulting firm McKinsey to "develop new perspectives." They sure have their work cut out for them. Condé revealed today that its monthly mags witnessed a 37 percent drop in advertising in September. [Gawker, AdAge, NYO]
• More pain at Condé may be on the way: "Significant cost cuts, including more layoffs and the closing of more magazines" are coming, says Keith Kelly. [NYP]
• Yet more Condé news: The company is closing down Men.Style.com so it can focus on the soon-to-be relaunched websites of GQ and Details. [AdAge]
• The Boston Globe's largest union voted yesterday to approve the new contract that had been proposed by the New York Times Co. [NYT, E&P]
• This can't be a good sign about the state of affairs at CNN: Time Warner Cable is moving it from channel 10 to 78 and replacing it with FX. [MCN]

So Conde Nast has hired McKinsey, the smartest people in the world, to "develop new perspectives" for them. What does it usually mean when McKinsey's asked to do that? Layoffs!

That was quick. Here is the grim memo that Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend just sent out announcing that it is bringing in McKinsey & Company to "develop new perspectives on optimizing our approach to business." This will be brutal.

Ah, the September Issues—when fashion magazines sell more ads than any other month, and staffers gorge themselves on parsley, in celebration. How are the September ad sales looking this year? Not too fab. Especially for Vogue.

• How many networks covered the Jackson memorial? Count 'em yourself: ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, HLN, MTV, VH1, VH1 Classic, VH1Soul, BET, E!, TV Guide, TV One, Univision and Telemundo. [AdWeek]
• The WSJ is planning a weekly New York-only arts-and-culture section. [NYO]
• Condé Nast will launch a version of GQ in China in October. At last! [NYT]
• The view from Sun Valley: Barry Diller doesn't think Twitter is ever going to make any money. But Disney chief Bob Iger says we're all going to be paying for online content in the near future. So everyone is in agreement. [WSJ, WSJ]
• OK!'s $500K cover of a dying Michael Jackson wasn't a big hit. [DF]
• The New York Times has pulled down a gallery of photos that had been digitally manipulated, presumably without its knowledge. [E&P]
• Coming in 2010: An entire cable channel devoted to Olympic sports. [THR]
• The adult entertainment industry is phasing out "narrative arcs" and dialogue, and it's supposedly because the Internet has shortened attention spans. [NYT]

Most magazine editors spend their days discussing story ideas with writers and editors, reviewing copy, and deciding what pieces will appear in upcoming issues. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter? He does that, too, but the part-time restaurateur also carves out a chunk of time every day to tend to the "daily process of populating the dining room" at Monkey Bar, a "choreography" he performs in conjunction with an associate editor at the magazine. (So, yes, while Condé Nast is currently laying off staffers, it's also pays one to manage the seating chart for Carter's little side project.) So how does Carter go about performing this pleasureless ("I'm like the guy with the sandbags") and clearly unhealthy task, one that's especially challenging since so many people want a reservation, the restaurant has been reduced to only accepting table requests by email?

Big Ideas Author Malcolm Gladwell, a Manhattanite of the New Yorker, has issued a smackdown review of Free, the book from Big Ideas Author Chris Anderson, a Berkeleyan of San Francisco's Wired. If that's not provocative enough, Gladwell sounds downright grumpy.

In your overwhelmed Friday media column: Iran just arrests everyone, for reporting, Conde Nast's September prayers will not be answered, a new chairman at the FCC, and the Mark Sanford source remains at large.

This is what happens when magazines die too fast. Conde Nast folded Men's Vogue last October. But don't worry, Men's Vogue subscribers! We're hooking you up with a subscription to Portfolio. Wait.